Children are the easy audience. They are also not the ones currently cultivating the wetland.
Why we train teachers instead of teaching
A visiting NGO officer running a session is memorable and finite. When our funding for that district ends, so does the programme, and three years later nothing remains except a photograph in a report.
Training the school's own teachers is slower to set up, less impressive to watch, and considerably more likely to still be happening after we leave. We supply the curriculum, the materials and the training; the school supplies the teacher and the continuity.
It also means the content gets adapted by someone who knows the children, which produces better teaching than anything we would deliver as outsiders.
What the school programme covers
- Where the water in the school tap comes from, traced on a map to the Buhweju hills.
- What a wetland does, taught at a wetland rather than on a blackboard where possible.
- Practical tree nursery work, with the school keeping and planting what it raises.
- Simple water quality observation — turbidity and smell — that pupils can do themselves.
- What happens downstream, including Lake Mburo, so the river is understood as a system.
Adult and community training
The harder half of the work. These are sessions with the households whose livelihood currently depends on doing the thing we are asking them to stop, and they only work if we arrive with something to offer rather than a lecture.
Sessions cover buffer agreements, nursery technique, improved dryland cultivation, and beekeeping. They are run at times that suit farming households rather than office hours, which usually means early morning or late afternoon.
Attendance figures count people, not sessions. A programme reporting attendances rather than individuals can multiply its numbers by simply running more meetings for the same group.
We were carrying water up from the river twice a day. The tank changed the school day more than any lesson about conservation did.
For teachers and head teachers
If you run a school in the catchment districts and want the programme, get in touch. There is no charge, and the commitment is a teacher's time rather than money.